Advertising plays an important role in the broadcast programming industry. The costs of programming are either subsidized by advertisements or paid for entirely by advertisements, as in the case of over-the-air broadcasting. Furthermore, monthly cable subscription can be affected by the revenues from advertisements.
The technology for advertisement insertion has been around for quite some time. Primarily, network broadcasters, both local and national, divide their airtime into two categories. First, there is “programming,” reserved for informational broadcasting and entertainment. Secondly, “avails” are reserved for advertising. These advertising avails may account for as much as 20-25% of total transmitting time. Usually, these avails are divided into smaller intervals of 15, 30, up to 60 seconds.
In many prior art systems, the insertion of advertisements in avails is handled by a combination of cue-tone detectors, switching equipment and tape players, which hold the advertising material. Upon receipt of the cue tones, an insertion controller automatically turns on a tape player containing the advertisement. Switching equipment then switches the system output from the video and audio signals received from the programming source to the output of the tape player. The tape player remains on for the duration of the advertising, after which the insertion controller causes the switching equipment to switch back to the video and audio channels of the programming source. When switched, these successive program and advertising segments usually feed to a radio-frequency (RF) modulator for delivery to the subscribers.
Many subscriber television systems, such as cable television, are currently being converted to digital equipment. These new digital systems compress the advertising data, e.g., using Motion Picture Experts Group 2 (MPEG 2) compression, store the compression data as a digital file on a large disk drive (or several drives), and then, upon receipt of the cue tone, spool (“play”) the file off of the drive to a decoder. The video and accompanying audio data are decompressed back to a standard video and audio, and switched into the video/audio feed of the RF modulator for delivery to the subscriber. This comprises the insertion of digitally stored material into an analog stream.
Alternatively, the video delivery system may be entirely digital, in which case the ads may be spooled from the drive and inserted directly into a digital programming stream, where decoding takes place at the set-top box in the subscriber residence. This is the case for digital-into-digital insertion.
A prior art (present model) of providing advertisements along with actual programming is based on linked sponsorship. In the linked sponsorship model, the advertisements are inserted into the actual programming based on the demographic information related to the viewer/subscribers. However, the ability to transmit information digitally allows programming and advertisements to be transported from various geographic locations and arranged in a fashion which permits an optimized program to be presented to a subscriber.
The transition to the digital age permits a migration to new methods of advertising based on what is termed orthogonal sponsorship. In orthogonal sponsorship, the advertisements are targeted at subscribers based on a determination that the advertisement will be of interest to the subscriber and that the subscriber is likely to ultimately purchase the product or service being advertised.
In addition, with the advent of digital technology, the migration to digital media including digital video will allow for the targeting of advertisements, and in particular, will allow for the targeting of advertisements down to the individual level. Although such granularity allows for the very precise targeting of advertisements, management and in particular the sales of advertisements, can be very difficult due to the sheer number of advertising opportunities which are created in the digital environment.
As an example, in targeted television advertising it is possible to deliver advertisements to small geographic groups over traditional Hybrid Fiberoptic Coaxial (HFC) systems, and to individual homes in Switched Digital Video (SDV) systems. In SDV systems, algorithms have been developed to aggregate homes into groups which allow for targeting to groups, rather than to individual homes. Nevertheless, the increased inventory of avails is difficult to manage and sell. What is needed is a method and system for creating groups of avail sections which are manageable.